By Peter Wells
On a recent episode of Radio National's Download This Show (available as a podcast) Marc Fennell and guests workshopped how they would build the perfect podcast app. The problem with podcasts, they argued, was they're difficult to discover and share. Until these issues were solved, podcasts were never going to capitalise on their popularity.
It was a great discussion, but I'm not convinced another app is the answer.
Andrew Denton's 2015 podcast, Better Off Dead, was very successful - unlike many.Credit: Edwina Pickles
One suggestion put forth by a guest, South China Morning Post journalist Olivia Rosenman, was that all podcasts needed to be transcribed to text, so search engines can begin indexing discussions. Google is already doing this to an extent. When you upload a video to YouTube, Google's speech recognition bots scan over the videos to create closed caption subtitles. The results aren't perfect, but they're improving.
Google promises to add the same automatic speech recognition technology to its podcasting service within Google Music. It makes sense: scanning through millions of podcast episodes will only make its bots smarter, and make its search engine more powerful. Alas, podcasts are only available in Google Music in the US.
The other key complaint of current podcast apps was shareability. The panel lamented it was too difficult to find the shows your friends listen to and recommend, and too hard to recommend shows to your social networks.
The Australian made podcast app Pocket Casts makes sharing a show, an individual episode, or even a specific moment within an episode easy, but it's a one-way street. You can link out from Pocket Casts to any network on your phone, but you can't see what your Facebook friends are subscribed to, or what they're recommending. Another app, Overcast, lets you see what's popular among Twitter users, but results skew heavily towards US content.
No app seems to have the built-in smarts of something like Netflix: that is, analysing your podcast library to suggest new shows based on your listening habits, and the listening habits of people like you. But that's not specifically an app problem.
Podcasters need to start making shareable content: smaller clips that work on the medium they're sharing to. There's little point sharing a two-hour show on a site like Facebook or Twitter, where attention is limited and the audience jumps in and out of the hundreds of links on their timeline. Podcasters need to be making their own shareable snippets, teasers, and promos – bite-sized audio that leads people to their show.
But even if producers go to all that effort, there's one thing podcasts are missing. Music. Real music from bands you've heard of. For years I hoped Apple or Pandora or anyone would create an app that could automatically insert music into podcast episodes, to give shows more of a radio experience.
I hoped the solution would come from an app, because I never imagined the record industry would offer podcasters access to its catalogue. But in a post-Spotify world, what's stopping them? I guarantee no one would download a highly compressed hour-long podcast just to pirate a song somewhere among the talk. So why can't independent podcasters be offered a licensing deal similar to community radio? I can't see a downside for podcasters, listeners or artists, unless we discover our favourite talkers have terrible taste in music.
Podcasts have been around for more than 10 years now, but in that time not much has changed. iTunes is still the main source of podcasting, and iTunes charts are still dominated by traditional radio programs repackaged for digital download. Podcasting needs a major shift, not from a new app or exposure from a wildly popular show like Serial. Podcasters need more creativity in producing and marketing their shows, better tools to accomplish that, and better access to the music that radio enjoys.